The present invention relates to medical imaging, and more particularly, to automatic prediction of pigtail catheter motion in a fluoroscopic image sequence.
Aortic valve disease affects a large number of people globally and is the most common type of valvular disease in developed countries. Implantation of a prosthetic aortic valve is often necessary to replace a severely damaged native valve. Although open-chest valve surgery is a well established procedure, minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is an emerging technique, especially for high-risk patients, to minimize the surgical trauma. Interventional surgeries, such as TAVI, are typically performed under the guidance of real time fluoroscopic (x-ray) images. As the minimally invasive TAVI technique is emerging, physicians increasingly focus on minimizing the risks and making the surgery less invasive in order to minimize the trauma, especially for high-risk patients. For example, it is desirable to reduce the times of exposure to and the amount of the potentially toxic contrast agent that is injected into a patient's blood. Most of such contrast injections are used to highlight the aorta and coronaries in fluoroscopic images in order to visually guide physicians as to where the vessels are. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an aortic mask overlay throughout the image sequences in order to perform the same function as the contrast agent to reduce contrast injection times.